Monday, February 11, 2008

Poetry Workshops

Tonight's meeting of my poetry workshop for middle-school teachers will be sparsely attended, it seems. A number of emails already to cancel, and I've just learned that we're due for six inches of snow tonight--in fact (checks window) it's already begun to fall.

A pity! Tonight's guest is an amazing teacher, here to talk about bringing the Poetry Out Loud model of teaching poetry through recitation--teaching everything about it, close-reading style--to the middle school arena. (POL is a high school program.)

I will not be discouraged. This is a wonderful program, and if the logistics have turned out to be more complicated than I'd expected, I'll just do them differently next time. (In retrospect, maybe a week or two in the summer would have been better than monthly meetings all year long. But I can't do this in the summer of '08, or '09, and I won't wait until '10 to do it again. So I'll need a new model. School visits? A ten-week "course"?)

If you have ideas, I'd love to hear them! In the mean time, I'm off to learn, to teach, and to enjoy a few poems while the woods (and streets) fill up with snow.

April showers bring May flowers; what do February snows bring?

Why, the waters of March!

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